England, that foggy place somewhere far across the great, wide ocean has been sending its funny-talking pop culture exports this way for many a year.
No harm in that, we drown them in our movies and music much more than any country does to us. America’s control over what much of the world outside our borders watches and listens to makes turnabout fair play.
This makes it even more amusing when we follow the cultural products of Great Britain over our own.
A friend of mine glories in the rock music those islands spit out. Oasis, Blur, the Manic Street Preachers, Pulp, Travis and Supergrass are all heavily represented in the man’s CD collection.
Is it the allure of cool, different accents speaking the same language we do? Or is it the fact that those accents don’t quite come through in singing, which uses the same notes and a lot of the same intonations the world over? Or is it that the British haven’t given up on the wheezing, decayed beast that is rock ’n’ roll?
Great Britain itself has been morphing U.S. culture into its own since the 1960s. Rock ’n’ roll grew from the blues and jazz in the United States, then The Beatles listened to their Chuck Berry records, did some drugs and rock ’n’ roll jumped from adolescence into adulthood.
The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream and Black Sabbath were all Englishmen who listened to U.S. music and made something of their own from it. The United States didn’t produce an especially credible hard rock band until Aerosmith flew up the charts in the early 1970s.
Today, something has changed.
Tastes in the United States have shifted, making my friend’s huge collection of English rock an anomaly rather than the norm.
Since Robbie Williams’ single “Millennium” became a success after massive promotion last year, we haven’t had a Brit break big on our side of the Atlantic.
Why have we gone from consuming their version of our music to making our own?
Probably because Great Britain seems to be out of step with contemporary U.S. music, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Britain’s own fun-loving teenyboppers, the Spice Girls, have disappeared, and their slightly more mature version, All Saints, never made it big here.
Britain doesn’t produce what the mainstream U.S. wants. No hip-hop acts have come across the Atlantic Ocean to big sales. Groups such as Tricky and Massive Attack’s versions of the style are not loved by audiences in the United States, who prefer the real thing or else more rote interpreters such as Limp Bizkit.
The teenybopper pop resurgence the Spice Girls helped start has been taken over by the pack of former Mousketeers dominating the airways in the guises of Britney Spears, N’Sync and the rest of the clones.
Rock isn’t dead yet in Britain, as it might possibly be here. Anytime The Wallflowers’ boring adult contemporary pap is touted as one of the big rock releases of the fall by Rolling Stone magazine and the like, we are in bad shape. In Britain, however, the demise of Oasis as a transatlantic act brought in Scottish pop-rockers Travis as the next big ocean crossers.
Rock magazines drooled upon the soft-spoken lads from Edinburgh with reviews written by music geeks like me. The public, however, didn’t care to follow, and Travis toured North America, playing clubs instead of the stadiums they fill in Britain.
People from the U.S. are taking movies back as well, as if some national call to arms was issued to eschew the next “The Full Monty.” Hollywood even co-opted a cool, old British movie “Get Carter” into a Sylvester Stallone star vehicle.
Is there a plot among the media companies that feed us our pop culture snack to take British cuisine off the menu?
Was “The Patriot” - an over-heated origin myth made by an incompetent German director and an Australian star who might consider the British evil - an attempt to wean us off our British pop culture stew?
Or am I seeing a conspiracy in what was simply a bad movie? Who knows, but when they knock down my door they’ll have to pry my Blur albums from my cold, dead fingers. Rule Britannia!
Daniel Pepper, State News music reporter, can be reached at pepperda@msu.edu.
